CONFLICT THEORY

The several social theories that emphasize
social conflict have roots in the ideas of Karl
Marx (1818-1883), the great German theorist and political
activist. The Marxist, conflict approach emphasizes a materialist
interpretation of history, a dialectical method of analysis,
a critical stance toward existing social arrangements, and a
political program of revolution or, at least, reform.

The materialistview of history starts from the premise that the most important
determinant of social life is the work people are doing, especially
work that results in provision of the basic necessities of life,
food, clothing and shelter. Marx thought
that the way the work is socially organized and the technology
used in production will have a strong impact on every other aspect
of society. He maintained that everything of value in society
results from human labor. Thus, Marx saw
working men and women as engaged in making society, in creating
the conditions for their own existence.

Marx summarized the key elements of this
materialist view of history as follows:

In the social production of their existence,
men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent
of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to
a given stage in the development of their material forces of
production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes
the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which
arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond
definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production
of material life conditions the general process of social, political
and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that
determines their existence, but their social existence that determines
their consciousness (Marx
1971:20).

Marx divided history into several stages,
conforming to broad patterns in the economic structure
of society. The most important stages for Marx's argument were
feudalism, capitalism,
and socialism.
The bulk of Marx's writing is concerned with applying the materialist
model of society to capitalism, the stage of economic and social
development that Marx saw as dominant in
19th century Europe. For Marx, the central
institution of capitalist society is private property,
the system by which capital (that is, money, machines,
tools, factories, and other material objects used in production)
is controlled by a small minority of the population. This arrangement
leads to two opposed classes, the owners of capital (called
the bourgeoisie) and the workers (called the proletariat),
whose only property is their own labor time, which they have
to sell to the capitalists.

Owners are seen as making profits by paying workers less than
their work is worth and, thus, exploiting them. (In Marxist
terminology, material forces of production ormeans
of production include capital, land, and labor, whereas
social relations of production refers to the division
of labor and implied class relationships.)

Economic exploitation leads directly to political oppression,
as owners make use of their economic power to gain control of
the state and turn it into a servant of bourgeois economic interests.
Police power, for instance, is used to enforce property rights
and guarantee unfair contracts between capitalist and worker.
Oppression also takes more subtle forms: religion serves capitalist
interests by pacifying the population; intellectuals, paid directly
or indirectly by capitalists, spend their careers justifying
and rationalizing the existing social and economic arrangements.
In sum, the economic structure of society molds the superstructure,
including ideas (e.g., morality, ideologies, art, and literature)
and the social institutions that support the class structure
of society (e.g., the state, the educational system, the family,
and religious institutions). Because the dominant or ruling
class (the bourgeoisie) controls the social relations of
production, the dominant ideology
in capitalist society is that of the ruling class. Ideology and
social institutions, in turn, serve to reproduce and perpetuate
the economic class structure. Thus, Marx
viewed the exploitative economic arrangements of capitalism as
the real foundation upon which the superstructure of social,
political, and intellectual consciousness is built. (Figure 1
depicts this model of historical materialism.)

Marx's view of history might seem completely cynical or pessimistic,
were it not for the possibilities of change revealed by his method
of dialectical analysis. (The Marxist dialectical
method, based on Hegel's earlier idealistic dialectic, focuses
attention on how an existing social arrangement, or thesis,
generates its social opposite, or antithesis, and on how
a qualitatively different social form, or synthesis, emerges
from the resulting struggle.) Marx was an
optimist. He believed that any stage of history based on exploitative
economic arrangements generated within itself the seeds of its
own destruction. For instance, feudalism, in which land owners
exploited the peasantry, gave rise to a class of town-dwelling
merchants, whose dedication to making profits eventually led
to the bourgeois revolution and the modern capitalist
era. Similarly, the class relations of capitalism will lead inevitably
to the next stage, socialism.
The class relations of capitalism embody a contradiction:
capitalists need workers, and vice versa, but the economic interests
of the two groups are fundamentally at odds. Such contradictions
mean inherent conflict and instability, the class struggle.
Adding to the instability of the capitalist system are the inescapable
needs for ever-wider markets and ever-greater investments in
capital to maintain the profits of capitalists. Marx
expected that the resulting economic cycles of expansion and
contraction, together with tensions that will build as the working
class gains greater understanding of its exploited position (and
thus attains class
consciousness), will eventually culminate in a socialist
revolution.

Despite this sense of the unalterable logic of history, Marxists
see the need for social criticism and for political activity
to speed the arrival of socialism, which, not being based on
private property, is not expected to involve as many contradictions
and conflicts as capitalism. Marxists believe that social theory
and political practice are dialectically intertwined, with theory
enhanced by political involvement and with political practice
necessarily guided by theory. Intellectuals ought, therefore,
to engage in praxis, to combine political criticism and
political activity. Theory itself is seen as necessarily critical
and value-laden, since the prevailing social relations are based
upon alienating
and dehumanizing exploitation of the labor of the working
classes.

Marx's ideas have been applied and reinterpreted by scholars
for over a hundred years, starting with Marx's close friend and
collaborator, Friedrich Engels (1825-95), who supported Marx
and his family for many years from the profits of the textile
factories founded by Engels' father, while Marx
shut himself away in the library of the British Museum. Later,
Vladimir I. Lenin (1870-1924), leader of the Russian revolution,
made several influential contributions to Marxist theory. In
recent years Marxist theory has taken a great variety of forms,
notably the world-systems theory proposed by Immanuel Wallerstein
(1974, 1980) and the comparative theory of revolutions put forward
by Theda Skocpol (1980). Marxist ideas
have also served as a starting point for many of the modern feminist
theorists. Despite these applications, Marxism of any variety
is still a minority position among American sociologists.